Intimacy in America

Intimacy in America

Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature

Peter Coviello

$20.00 Paper
ISBN: 0-8166-4381-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4381-3

$60.00 Cloth
ISBN: 0-8166-4380-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4380-6

Offers a major rereading of the antebellum literary canon.

Nineteenth-century America was a sprawling new nation unmoored from precedent and the mainstays of European nationalism. In their search for nationality, Americans sought coherence instead in a sense of far-reaching mutuality, of connection between scattered strangers.

Reading seminal works by Jefferson, Poe, Melville, Stowe, and Whitman, Peter Coviello traces these writers’ enthusiasms and their ambivalences about the dream of an intimate nationality, revealing how race and sexuality were used as vehicles for an imagined national coherence. As Coviello shows, race—and especially whiteness—functioned less as a form of identity than as a model of attachment and identification, a language of affiliation. Whiteness came to symbolize not only civic entitlement but a kind of affinity between strangers, which itself became entangled in the nation’s evolving codes of sexuality. Bringing race theory and “white studies” into dialogue with questions of intimacy and affect, Coviello provides a practical rapprochement between historicist and psychoanalytic methodologies.

At once a work of race theory, American sexual history, and scrupulous literary scholarship, Intimacy in America gives us a new perspective on the still-current dream of Americanness as an impassioned relation to far-flung, anonymous others.

“Intimacy in America compellingly articulates the erotic suggestiveness discoverable at many points in America’s classic literature and politicized it by linking it to conceptions of national identity.” —Studies in American Fiction

“[An] intelligent, innovative book. The relevance of its subject matter to the present and its fresh take on overly familiar texts (and even on Foucault) make a good resource for an advanced audience. Recommended.” —Choice

"Intimacy in America is a very smart book, but it is also a beautiful and passionate one. " —GLQ

Peter Coviello is associate professor of English at Bowdoin College.

240 pages | 5 7⁄8 x 9 | 2005



Intimacy in America Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature Peter Coviello		$20.00 Paper ISBN: 0-8166-4381-4 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4381-3 $60.00 Cloth ISBN: 0-8166-4380-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4380-6
Offers a major rereading of the antebellum literary canon. Nineteenth-century America was a sprawling new nation unmoored from precedent and the mainstays of European nationalism. In their search for nationality, Americans sought coherence instead in a sense of far-reaching mutuality, of connection between scattered strangers. Reading seminal works by Jefferson, Poe, Melville, Stowe, and Whitman, Peter Coviello traces these writers’ enthusiasms and their ambivalences about the dream of an intimate nationality, revealing how race and sexuality were used as vehicles for an imagined national coherence. As Coviello shows, race—and especially whiteness—functioned less as a form of identity than as a model of attachment and identification, a language of affiliation. Whiteness came to symbolize not only civic entitlement but a kind of affinity between strangers, which itself became entangled in the nation’s evolving codes of sexuality. Bringing race theory and “white studies” into dialogue with questions of intimacy and affect, Coviello provides a practical rapprochement between historicist and psychoanalytic methodologies. At once a work of race theory, American sexual history, and scrupulous literary scholarship, Intimacy in America gives us a new perspective on the still-current dream of Americanness as an impassioned relation to far-flung, anonymous others. “Intimacy in America compellingly articulates the erotic suggestiveness discoverable at many points in America’s classic literature and politicized it by linking it to conceptions of national identity.” —Studies in American Fiction “[An] intelligent, innovative book. The relevance of its subject matter to the present and its fresh take on overly familiar texts (and even on Foucault) make a good resource for an advanced audience. Recommended.” —Choice "Intimacy in America is a very smart book, but it is also a beautiful and passionate one. " —GLQ Peter Coviello is associate professor of English at Bowdoin College. 240 pages \| 5 7⁄8 x 9 \| 2005